Dio Padre benedicente tra due angeli

This is a piece of a wall. God the Father leans out of the plaster with one hand raised in blessing, ringed by angels, painted around 1514 for the convent church of Sant'Antonio in Perugia, in central Italy. It sat high above an altarpiece from Raphael's workshop, made while the master himself was busy covering the pope's rooms in the Vatican, more than a hundred miles south in Rome. Centuries later the painting was cut from its wall and lifted away in a thin skin of colour and plaster, the delicate operation that lets a fresco travel like a canvas. It came to the Louvre in 1870. The half-circle shape it keeps is the lunette it was born in, the curved space above the altar.